38 stitute, whose faculty he recently joined. Some forty students took notes, and two other chefs looked on intently, like doc- tors following the senior surgeon on grand rounds. Soltner, a handsome man with thinning silver hair and round brown eyes, was preparing salmon with pike mousseline in pastry-just the sort of rich, classic confection that Lutèce was famous for. He is of the view that chefs who promise to banish cream, butter, and flour from their sauces don't know how to make a sauce. Snip, snip, and the Master had pried a perfect fillet from the salmon. After a min- ute's deft slicing, crimping, and trimming, the fillet was stuffed with herbs and the mousselIne and was then locked into a puff pastry shaped like a fish-tail, scales, and an eye. Another salmon was already baking, and a warm, crusty smell began to waft across the room. As Soltner worked, with his ministrations reflected in a mir- ror overhead, he talked, running apho- risms together with fine points of tech- nique. The mousseline would need more heavy cream if the pike was dry or very cold, less ifit was oily or at room tempera- ture. "Cooking is not exactly two plus two heard to complain of satiation. Then the class was over, and the students surged to the front to ask advice, take pictures, commune with the chef of chefs. Soltner smiled, a man in his element. As he wrote in a preface to his new book, "My wish to cook for others, and for my food to be ap- preciated, is a wish to do what my mother did, a wish to be for others what she was for us. The possibility that my cooking will please people, and that they will be pleased with me because of it, is what always excited me about being a chef" .... SABRINA PERE S AMUEL TAYLOR, who is eighty-three years old, is spry and youthful and handsome enough to be in pictures him- self In the living room of his house in East Blue Hill, Maine, there is a framed photograph ofhun and Marlene Dietrich in the fifties, in which he bears a striking resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Taylor wrote the 1953 Broadway play "Sabrina Fair," which told the story of Sabrina Fairchild, a North Shore, Long Island, chauffeur's daughter who falls in love with the boss's son. Para- mount bought the film rights André Soltner before the play was produced, and Taylor and Billy Wilder worked on the screenplay to- gether until Taylor had to return to New York to begin rehears- als for the play with Margaret Sullavan and Joseph Cotten. Ernest Lehman co-wrote the last third of the screenplay with Wilder, who then directed the movie, starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden. Now Paramount is set to release a remake directed by Sydney Pollack, this time starring Julia Ormond, Greg Kinnear, and Harrison Ford. It re- mains to be seen whether Sabrina Fair- child, the most memorable Galatea of the postmodern era, has survived. Taylor, who co-wrote Alfred Hitch- cock' s "Vertigo" and has written many other movies and plays in his long career, re- cently recalled "Sabrina" , s transition from stage to film. "Billy asked me if I minded changing the play, and I said, 'No, let's change it. I don't want to write the play again,' " Taylor said. So they shaped T ay- lor's gritty, edgy story into what he laugh- ingly calls "a Mitteleuropean fairy tale." The result, aside from an oddly cast Bogart as is four," he said, peering at his handiwork. "You do a little bit with your feelings." The students were shy, and the chef start- ed answering his own questions. 'What's wrong in most restaurants is the portions are too big," Soltner said, hauling out a large knife to slice up the golden-brown salmon en croûte that had been removed from the oven. 'When he has enough, and he just could eat a little more-that's when the customer is satisfied." Soltner then bent to the task of slic- ing the salmon into slender ribbons. Plates were passed around the class, each with a little puddle of sauce choron--a béarnaise infused with tomato pulp. The room fell into an awestruck silence; no one was the older brother (Cary Grant turned down the role), is a timeless, shimmery movie in no apparent need of remaking. Shortly after Paramount chose Pollack to direct, he called Taylor to ask if he could come to Maine to ruscuss the pro- ject. He said he would fly himself (he pi- lots his own Learjet), and asked if there was a nearby airport that could accommo- date a jet. Taylor assured him that, since the Hancock County-Bar Harbor Airport was big enough for Rockefellers summer- ing nearby, his plane would probably not run out of runway. "So he flew in," Tay- lor said. "I met him, we talked for a while. He ate two lobsters. We talked a bit more, and he said, 'Oh my God, I've got to get back to the Coast!' And away he went. ''It was amusing while he was here, be- cause I challenged him. I said, 'As long as you're doing it, why don't you do it the way you want to? Change it. Make it your own' " But Pollack told him he liked it just fine as it was. "He said, 'They just want me to bring it up to date.' It's very interesting, that word 'they' It's always in quotes, especially in Hollywood. No names are ever mentioned, because actually no names are ever involved. It's just 'they.' " Taylor says that the shooting script he was shown was somewhat more straIght- forward than either his own play or the Wilder movie. In the new scnpt, for in- stance, Harrison Ford asks Julia Ormond to "save" him. It's a line from the play, but this time it is rendered without irony. Today's Hollywood is unable to resist the notion that businessmen need to be saved. It's not that Taylor doesn't approve of the new "Sabrina" script, and he likes and admires Sydney Pollack. It's more that he seems disappointed that Hollywood, the second time around, didn't want to change Sabrina enough. Oddly, the ur-Sabrina, in the play, was the most liberated of all the Sabrinas so far-she had a good college education and worked in Paris for the Marshall Plan. In the Wilder movie, she's a Givenchy-dressed waif who trained as a chef; in the Pollack movie, a gofer for a fashion-magazIne stylist. ''You know, if they really wanted to make it interesting they'd find a really good black actress to play her ," Taylor saId, and added, laughing, "But they'd never do that." . 'The Widow," Amy Wilentz; "Prop Politics," John Hezlemann; 'The Shame of the Mara- thon," Warren St. John; "Hail to the Chef" James Traub; "Sabri1lLl Père, " Christopher Buckley.